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When outputting spatial geometry directly to a Tableau Hyper file from Alteryx 2019.1.6 and rendering this in Tableau the maps do not automatically zoom to the area where the marks are. When outputting these same data from Alteryx to a shapefile, then rendering this in Tableau leads to the expected results. Using Tableau to extract from this shapefile into a Hyper file also leads to the correct results.

While a non-polygon mark type resolves the issue, this is not too helpful as typically you will want to render polygon shape when working with trade areas or other geographic boundaries (in this example a circle was used for simplicity and to not share proprietary data). When forcing Tableau to render any other mark type the software simply places the mark on centroid of the spatial object and scaling becomes relative.

The issue seems to only be impacting Hyper files created by Alteryx leading me to believe this is an Alteryx specific issue.

The workflow that created the shapefile and Hyper file is seen below:

I have tested this with other spatial formats Alteryx can output and it seems isolated to Alteryx created Hyper files.

This has been an issue in the Alteryx .hyper output since it was introduced in Alteryx v2018.1 through at least v2019.1 (I haven't tested on v2019.2 yet). Last year I got some support from Tableau on this, what they found was that the default zoom is set to the whole planet. Apparently this was an issue coming from an earlier release of the Tableau extract API that was fixed in early calendar 2018 but Alteryx isn't using the latest version of Tableau's extract API.

Our present workaround is to output separate files for the data and spatial object(s) e.g. a .hyper file with the data and a .shp file for each spatial object and then join them in Tableau.

The workaround with exporting multiple files and doing the join in Tableau is similar to what we have been doing as well. Unfortunately, this can get messy when automating or when publishing the data directly to Tableau Server.

FYI I've validated that I'm still seeing the same behavior in v2019.2. I did some more digging into my notes, I'd submitted this issue to support back in August 2018 with reference 00DE0JJZ4 and one bit that came out of that was finding out that the issue doesn't occur for .tde outputs, only .hyper. Also the "Alteryx isn't using the latest version of the extract API" statement I made was a guess based the behavior, not a fully verified statement.